Bitter Road To Reconciliation

Greyhound Strike Exacts Steep Price From Workers, Firm, Nation

John Lubrano never expected the strike to last three years. And he didn't expect to go months without a job or to sweep streets for $5.25 an hour, and that's only when he finds such work.

He hardly expected the stress to overcome him, giving him persistent angina pains at 41 and whopping unpaid hospital bills.

"You get rundown. You get depressed, and depression brings on a lot of aches and pains," said Lubrano, who drove a Greyhound Lines Inc. bus for 13 years until the Amalgamated Transit Union struck Greyhound in 1990.

While Lubrano has yet to find a full-time job in the Philadelphia area, Rita Johnese, 38, has been driving a bus for a small San Francisco company for 2 1/2 years.

But they have not been good years.

The strike and the lower wages at the smaller firm forced her to sell her home and move in with her parents. "It has been terrible. Very traumatic," said Johnese, a single mother of two children, one night after a 10-hour shift.

Nowadays, she worries her company may lose business and lay her off.

"We've had a lot of broken homes," says Clark Marshall, an ATU official in Detroit who drives a local bus at two-thirds his old Greyhound salary. "One guy drank himself to death. I don't know if it would've happened (without) the strike or not."

The toll of this long, bitter dispute that ended with the union's recent acceptance of a six-year contract has been steep, indeed, for workers, the union, Greyhound and the nation as well.

So, too, organized labor and big business see different lessons from the experience.

Union leaders use the Greyhound strike as a rallying cry in their fight in Congress to pass a law banning striker replacements like those hired by the bus company. President Bill Clinton supports such a ban, and so do the Democrats, but they appear likely to face problems in the U.S. Senate.

The Republicans are expected to wage a filibuster on the strikebreaking bill as they did last year, possibly once again stymieing the Democrats, who could not raise 60 votes in the Senate to overcome the GOP's delaying tactic.

"It is a close call," says David Saltz, an AFL-CIO lobbyist in Washington. "We are working hard for every vote."

As long as employers can give away workers' jobs in a strike, the unions say they will remain weak and intimidated, and they point out that last year the nation saw only 35 major strikes, the lowest number since 1947.

"Unions have to be very careful when they strike today," says Art Malinowski, a professor of industrial relations at Loyola University. "Employers are willing to replace them, and so long as customers continue to purchase the product, the employer has the leverage."

But employers are equally adamant about their rights, and Greyhound officials, although they speak of a new era of cooperation with the ATU, are not willing to surrender the option of permanent replacements.

"The issue of replacement workers is a devastating one, but so is a strike," says Frank Schmieder, president and chief executive officer of the Dallas-based bus company, the nation's only intercity carrier.

"What alternative would a transportation company have that is struck?" he asks. "I really wonder if any transportation company could survive a strike."

Before the union rejected Greyhound's offer in 1990, the company had taken a tough stance, hiring and training replacement workers. A day after the union struck in protest of the company's decision to implement its final offer, Greyhound put the replacements to work.

The dispute dramatically altered bus service in the U.S.

Greyhound buses disappeared from hundreds of small towns not served by planes or trains.

Before the dispute, Greyhound carried 22 million passengers and traveled 322 million miles yearly. Now, it transports 16 million riders and covers 242 million miles annually. It shrank to 3,300 drivers from 6,300.

The strike, whose start in Chicago was marred by shots fired at the Greyhound station, left behind a violent legacy.

Within days of its beginning, sniper shots hit passenger-filled buses across the country, drivers were shot in Tennessee and Florida, and seven passengers suffered minor injuries from the shots fired at the bus in Florida.

Greyhound received more than 100 bomb threats in the early days of the strike. In the worst incident, a middle-aged striker on a picket line in Redding, Calif., was crushed to death when a newly hired driver accidentally backed over him.

Greyhound lost $30 million in the strike's first three months alone. After waging an intense campaign to build its revenues and public image, the firm sank straight into bankruptcy and its image tumbled.

The National Transportation Safety Board said inadequate driver training was the "probable cause" for two crashes in 1991 that left 47 people injured and took the life of one passenger.

Similarly, the Federal Highway Administration fined Greyhound last year for a number of violations, including letting 13 drivers who had failed their drug tests operate buses.